Superior Court Justice Patricia Hennessy is to determine how much the Crown owes for breaking a treaty promise to share wealth produced by the natural resources of a vast area in Northern Ontario
Indigenous communities are in court seeking billions of dollars in compensation after almost 150 years of receiving small annual payments in return for ceding an area the size of France. But the Ontario government is arguing they are owed nothing, or at most $34-million.
In 1850, Anishinaabe leaders signed two treaties with the Crown that gave over control of resource-rich lands stretching from the north shores of Lake Superior and Lake Huron to Hudson Bay, which today includes the communities of Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury and North Bay. lands. It will be the first such court-ordered plan in Canada, and it will have enormous practical consequences for thousands of Anishinaabe people in Northern Ontario, who courts have said were left impoverished by the Crown’s neglect of its treaty promise.pledge, set out in two 1850 treaties, to augment the annuity payments as Crown resource revenues permitted.
If the Supreme Court overturns that ruling, the entire exercise in Sudbury would be for naught. But given that the First Nations’ lawsuit over the treaty promise began in 1999, and that Anishinaabe elders knowledgeable in oral history and cultural matters are not getting any younger, the Supreme Court rejected Ontario’s request for a stay of the compensation hearings. So did Justice Hennessy.
Harley Schachter, a lawyer representing Red Rock, Whitesand and three other First Nations, likened Ontario’s position that governments owe virtually nothing to that of a fox left in charge of the chickens. The higher estimates in the tens of billions of dollars reflect not just what the Crown recouped in various fees, but the higher fees it could have charged if its aim had been to collect on their full value.
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